This invention relates to a cooking apparatus and, more particularly, to an improvement of the display device of a cooking apparatus having a plurality of cooking modes.
A conventional cooking apparatus is known wherein food can be heated or cooked in a heating chamber of a housing in accordance with a plurality of heating functions such as an oven function, a grill function and a microwave range oven function.
In a cooking apparatus of this type, a digital display device, for example, is usually arranged in an operation panel adjacent to a front door of the heating chamber in the housing to digitally display, for example, remaining cooking time on the display device during cooking. In this case, a cooking set time is digitally displayed at the beginning of cooking. The display contents are decremented every one second as the time elapses. When the food is cooked, the display content is zero.
In the conventional arrangement described above, a user cannot check a cooking state at a desired moment in order to know how many minutes of the total preset time have elapsed, resulting in inconvenience. In addition, when a user wishes to perform sequential cooking of food by combining, e.g., the microwave oven range function and the oven or grill function, the user cannot check at once how many minutes of the total preset time have elapsed, resulting in inconvenience.